Page 82 of Cruel Games

“What was that for, Dingo?” she asked in a saccharine sweet voice that set my teeth on edge. “You’d deny him the chance to beg for a quick death?”

I had two choices here. Either I backed up and said some smartass shit about wanting to get things over with or not having time to play games, or?—

I could be honest.

Which was infinitely more dangerous.

But then again, what was living if you only lived halfway?

Fuck it.

“Scum like him doesn’t deserve to lick the ground you walk on.”

Her brows rose substantially as she surveyed me, like she was seeing me for the first time in a new light. I didn’t know if that was good or bad, but she wasn’t giving any hints away.

Instead, she turned to where she’d leaned her bat against the tire of the dude’s car, wrapped her hand around the handle, and swung it half-assedly in my direction.

Musta been the wrong choice.

I ducked just in time to narrowly miss it as it whizzed by and connected with the side of our target’s head, knocking him out cold in one hit. He slowly roused, enough for him to register the pain and start screaming.

She silenced him with her second and third swings of that bat.

I watched the damn blood arc off her bat and paint the concrete, her shoes, even the side of her face as she brought the damn thing down on him two or three more times for good measure. When she finally stopped swinging, her shoulders heaved, the familiar sound of someone in the throes of a breakdown sucking wind to stay alive, to stay conscious.

So I made my first mistake of the night and reached for her, grabbing hold of her wrist and tugging her toward me, with every intention of checking to see if she was okay.

Her hands shot out automatically as she connected with me, her bat dropped and forgotten as the whole of her body landed pressed up against mine, from toe to top. I could feel the softness of her belly against my cock, which was doing its damnedest to prepare for something I knew damn well wouldn’t happen.

Not for lack of wanting, of course.

She stared up at me, this vixen in red, so dangerously pretty as she stared up at me through blood-coated lashes, that satisfied cat smile on her lips, those broken eyes so wide, so oddly vulnerable as they stared into thedepths of mine.

Who hurt you, pretty girl?

Right now would be the holiday small-town romance movie moment where the hero asks the heroine who hurt her. But I already knew the answer. She’d told me with her own words.

We destroyed her.

We turned her into this, a broken doll whose shell had been glued back together, small cracks in the porcelain where slivers went missing and were never found again. Chinks in her armor that life had worn away, a draft sneaking through despite her best efforts.

It didn’t matter who hurt her, though. Whether it was us, unintentionally or otherwise, or her father, who’d built his whole empire on using her as a smokescreen to hide his underage human trafficking and sexual exploitation racket. Right now, all that mattered, the only important thing, was that she didn’t trust us to put her back together. And she likely never would, especially when she learned the truth.

She’d never trust another human after that came out. And it inevitably would. There was no hiding it forever. Not from a smart girl like Ivy.

I reached down and threaded my fingers through her hair, her wrist still gripped in my other hand between us, smashed between her tits and my sternum. As I lowered my head to hers, her eyes turned heated, and she leaned up to meet my lips as they devoured hers.

There was no better word to describe the way that kiss, so dangerous, so foreign, so unexpected and irrational, consumed us. I dropped her wrist and wrapped that hand around her back, splaying my fingers across her tiny waist, tugging her against me in case she didn’t realize how much she affected me.

I wasn’t like Coyote or Jackal. I couldn’t stand here and pretend this woman wasn’t attractive. I didn’t outright hate her, despite what she’d done. Maybe some part of me could understand better than the others the small bit of humanity she’dburied to do what she had to, even if a part of her didn’t like it. I wasn’t quiet or shy, and I wasn’t absolutely psycho and fighting her mere existence every step of the way. When she bent over in the kitchen to pull something out of a cabinet or off a bottom shelf, I stared. My cock twitched. Saliva pooled in my mouth, like any red-blooded man.

When she fought Jackal, I took her side even when I tried not to. I found myself wanting to keep her, even though I knew this would eventually end in a fiery, blazing swan-dive straight into the pits of hell. When Coyote looked at her like she hung the moon, and she gave him those soft and sweet sad girl eyes, I got jealous.

But for me, she held nothing. There was no extreme when we were together.

And I wanted to change that.

Starting right now.

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